Quality Enabled Infrastructure - Bare Essentials

First of all software quality seems like a very good idea. Less defects or misinterpreted requirements means less rework, less maintenance, less lost opportunities.

And there is a large range of techniques, technologies and products which can help increase quality.

Shouldn't we use them all before we release the product?

The answer is simple: NO.

If you work on something which will be used only by you and two of your friends, I would even suggest accepting that it crashes from time to time if only it provides valuable results most of the time. Not to mention buying toolset for quality improvement which can cost hundreds of thousands. All it would give you is additional cost: time spent on implementing it, learning it, using it, interpreting results.

On the other hand if you are about to deploy your software to some hardware component which will leave your shop embedded into cars and driving in all directions with average speed 50 miles per hour you may want to make sure that you will not need to call all these cars back for the software update. Then the more the merrier on the software quality boosters shelf.

Obviously there is whole spectrum of software shops in between. How they should choose what to apply?

The answer isn't simple here, but I'm a believer in pragmatic approach to software quality which for me means: provide foundations and extend where and when it makes sense.

Foundations being:
* configuration management system
* facility to manage requirements (it can be Excel or even plain text file)
* facility to manage defect reports, enhancement requests
* some kind of quality indication (it can be as simple as plain number of defects to number of requirements)

Analyzing those on biweekly basis gives you an information which you can use to figure out what works and what not, whether applying some technique/technology would be freeing or tightening your resources and thus stretching or relaxing your constraints being budget, time etc. And to act on the information.